"I'm a Dominiyorkian of mixed decent. If you read my book [Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina] you will find that I'm mixed and that I am just one example of the many of how the new world came to be. I'm the genetic evidence that the new world happened. So can't just turn my back on one side of my culture and just call myself one thing. I feel like I'd be selling out the parts of who I am for better or for worse. Because there are things that we have in our blood that we don't want to have; that we don't want to admit. That we don't want to reconcile with. For example, growing up I always thought as the European man as the aggressor, but when you have European blood running down your veins too, you have to come to terms with that." -Raquel Cepeda

Jewell focuses on two nineteenth-century incidents involving school segregation. The post-Civil War era was a time of changing racial and gender ideologies. White Anglo-Protestant families in U.S. cities viewed the growing visibility of upwardly mobile racial outsiders as a threat. Meanwhile, public schools and other institutions serving children were growing, creating new roles for middle-class white womenâwhat Jewell calls âsocial mothering.â

In 1868, a white New Orleans engineer and Confederate army veteran learned there were nonwhite students attending his daughterâs school. When questioned, the schoolâs principal, the ironically-named Stephanie Bigot, provided a list of twenty-eight students âknown, or generally reputed to be coloredââpresumably girls whose appearances were passably âwhite.â Bigot claimed that she had no knowledge of their racial backgrounds but that there were rumors among the student body that they were not white.

Jewell writes that the enrollment of racially ambiguous girls posed a particular threat to white New Orleans families. âAllegations of racial passing compromised the entire student bodyâs ability to secure either marriage into a âgoodâ family or ârespectableâ employment,â he writes…

Mary Tape was a biracial Chinese American woman who believed that her daughter, Mamie, should have the same access to education as white children in San Francisco. In particular, Mary Tape wanted her daughter to be able to attend public school. When the local school principal, Jennie Hurley, stood in the schoolhouse door to bar Mamieâs entrance on the sole grounds that she was Chinese, Mary Tape took Jennie Hurley to court.

In 1885, almost seventy years before the famous Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education desegregated American public schools, Mary Tape sued the San Francisco School District to offer public education to all Chinese children. Tape v. Hurley was one of the most important civil rights decisions in American history. In this ground breaking case, Superior Court Judge James Maguire ruled that Chinese children must have access to public education: âTo deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this state, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States.â…